Now, for something different

Andrew Stephens

IT IS the biggest show ever curated by the National Gallery of Victoria and probably the largest and most ambitious by any Australian arts institution.

Celebrating Melbourne's latest art and design, director Tony Ellwood's daring new Melbourne Now project, which will engulf significant chunks of the NGV's two sites later this year, will also revolutionise the way Melburnians engage with the arts.

Ash Keating, who created West Park Proposition (pictured), has been involved in the NGV's Melbourne Now forums.

It will, Ellwood says, turn all the rhetoric about Melbourne's hallowed status as an artistic, design, fashion, film and architecture hub into something concrete.

''The whole impetus for the show is that we have such a rich, dynamic design community … but we don't really give the evidence,'' he says. ''As a state institution, I think we have a responsibility to signpost that from time to time and say, 'Look!' ''

Look we will - and Melburnians, in the lead-up, will have their say about what is good (and not) across the visual arts. On Sunday, Ellwood kicked off the first of several ''Melbourne Now'' forums, designed to get feedback from Melbourne's artists and audiences in preparation for the November show.

Everything about ''Melbourne Now'', he says, is new: the methodology, ambition, scale and ''letting go of some of the control''.

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''The forums are about listening and being accountable, listening to voices other than our own.''

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The huge show will be ''so contemporary'', Ellwood promises, that most of the work is being made in studios right now - ''even in studios where they don't yet know they are going to be approached, which I find quite exciting''. While he is close to making calls on the show's content, he expects about 120 artists and designers will exhibit. The process also allows him to see the best of what might be purchased for the NGV collection.

Returning to Melbourne last year after five years at the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art, which become hugely successful under his direction, Ellwood cannot contain his excitement at being back in such a lively arts city.

''At the risk of sounding self-indulgent, that's the whole reason the project evolved,'' he said. ''It was actually coming back into Melbourne, my head spinning every weekend: how many choices do I have of places to go - and every one's a quality offering. Going home and saying it's just so great to be in such an energised and enlightened community.''

That energy is infectious and in the administrative heart of the NGV International building on St Kilda Road, curators have been working around huge foam core boards spanning the corridor near their offices - what Ellwood describes as ''intellectual mood boards'' where images, names and ideas are pinned up, taken down, moved around and organised in clusters crossing territory - such as industrial and interior design - that the gallery does not traditionally grapple with.

''We talk about inclusiveness - it really is that everyone is in on this,'' he said. ''It is a very healthy way to work. Ultimately it has to have some leadership and there have to be decisions made but up until that point everyone feels they have a stake in it; that's not a standard process.''

Ellwood is firm that his engagement with contemporary art and design in this way is not at the expense of the gallery's historical program, nor its core academic values and serious intellectual content. ''As soon as you do something high-profile and broad in its appeal it is so easy to say, 'They've dumbed down!''' he says. While he says the gallery's responsibility is so much more than just being a repository for art, it has to balance engaging fully with its established, sophisticated market - and being a community hub for everyone from the elderly and new communities, to young families, all of whom should understand you don't have to be well dressed and well educated to enjoy an art museum.

That diversity was certainly the case at the first forum on Sunday: while speakers inside the building debated the serious issue of artistic collaboration, the NGV's garden sparkled with all-sorts enjoying DJs, food and wine, beach balls, and stacks of chairs borrowed from IKEA.

The NGV will host Intersections, its second Melbourne Now forum, from 1pm to 2.30pm on Sunday, February 10, featuring speakers including choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, fashion designer Susan Dimasi and Design Hub curator Fleur Watson.